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Wednesday, July 31, 2013

PROGRAMS IN PLACE OF PREACHING

(City Light
News, June 2013.) The writer of this article is puzzled that faithlessness
and church attendance are on the increase together. The answer just happens to
be in the big question period at the head of the article: ? Doctrinally anemic programs like Alpha (which has the big ? on the cover of its book) are largely
responsible for the increase of both faithlessness and church attendance.
‘Creative engagement’ is less offensive and judgmental than preaching; and so
it’s an attractive way for timid Christians to give church growth a whack. You
get lots of husk but not a lot of kernel that way, many unbelievers, but few
converts. Church growth, of whatever sort, must be what Alpha pastors are
after.

This is how dull the talking heads at church
meetings are. Faithlessness and church attendance are up. The cause of this
strange harmony: faithless programs that plant infidels in God’s Church. Not
realizing what the cause is, these heads of churches (ever talking, never
preaching) put their programmed heads together around some boardroom table and
decide to take advantage of the paradox by setting up a whole campaign of
programs! Yes, Alberta 2013! That’s
the newest gospel replacement. Get ready, not for revival, but for a bumper
crop of faithlessness. ‘Building bridges’ has a positive, constructive sound.
The problem is that the bridges lead to everywhere but the cross. The campaign
“will provoke people to ‘Question Everything.’” Yes, people will be provoked to
question many things—except the merits of all these faithless Alpha courses!
People are distracted by many things, it says in the article. Yes, they are
distracted by many things, not the least of which are programs like Alpha! Did
Peter or Paul and their Master try to ‘creatively engage’ sinners with
innocuous programs whose way of witnessing is to make faithless sinners feel
they have faith already? No, but the New Testament model is just too
discriminate and offensive for bloodless pastors to use. All their weak hearts
can do is pump up more programs. They have no heart for preaching, no heart for
the gospel, no heart for the heart of Christianity. They’re scared right down
to their shriveled up arteries. The truths that made great preachers of old
bubble up with heat and light, our pastors turn white at the suggestion of. To
preach down to sinners a gospel from above is a horrid thing to these men. To
say ‘repent’ with distinction, detail, and exclamation is the shibboleth they
can’t utter. They are foreigners to preaching, just as the men of Ephraim were
foreigners to the word that they couldn’t pronounce. They ‘compass land and
sea’ to make proselytes to programs, but take no steps at all to becoming
proselytes to preaching in order to save the souls they gather. The gospel is
their shame; programs are their crown. Alpha is their smooth way; the Way of
Life is too rough for them.

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for
it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew
first, and also to the Greek” (Romans 1.16.) And notice: “But we preach Christ
crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness” (1
Corinthians 1.23.) Many who are preached to stumble at the word and cause
trouble, like the unbelieving Jews who continually hunted the head of Paul.
Many others who are preached to regard the word as foolish, and so the
preachers of it they treat as fools. Caving in to such responses is what Paul
warned Timothy not to do: “Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of
our Lord” (2 Timothy 1.8.) Jamieson, Fausset, & Brown on this: “Paul…felt
it necessary to stir him up and guard him against the possibility of
unchristian dereliction of duty as to bold confession of Christ.” Is Alpha’s
cowardly approach a bold confession? It is because pastors have caved in to the
pressure of the possibility of persecution that they resort to programs in
place of preaching. They will not risk so much as being called fools for the
sake of preaching Christ. Caving in is what pastors do through Alpha and
similar inoffensive, seeker-friendly, creatively engaging, ecumenical-minded
courses and programs. To be ashamed of preaching Christ crucified is to be
ashamed of Christ, if anything is.

What kind of message does God use to effect revival
but the effective, faithful preaching of his holy word? Here is the sort of
content that a revival message contains, in the words of a minister actually
used by God in a broad way: “The object was to make the impenitent feel that
they were under a righteous condemnation, that they had destroyed themselves,
that their hearts were entirely alienated from God, that in this alienation lay
their guilt and not their excuse, that, of course, they were bound to repent and
become reconciled to God without a moment’s delay, that, nevertheless, so
desperate was the depravity of their hearts that nothing short of the power of
the Holy Ghost would ever subdue it, and that God was under no obligation to
exert that power. So far as could be known at the time, and so far as the
‘fruits’ enable us to determine, these and other kindred truths were ‘the power
of God unto salvation’, to multitudes that were ready to perish. The design was
to exalt God and bring the sinner in guilty at every step, not to terrify even
the vilest transgressor so as to render him incapable of reasoning and
reflection, but to induce him, under the strong convictions of an enlightened
conscience, to ‘flee from the wrath to come’, and ‘lay hold on eternal life’”
(Heman Humphrey, in W. B. Sprague’s Lectures
on Revivals of Religion, p. 360.)
Do ministers leading Alphapreach
like this? I know that they do not. Do they even try? I don’t think so.
Preaching Christ crucified involves more than coaxing people to a ‘decision.’

Are you a pastor seeking to gain a world of
churchgoers through faithless programs? Are you willing to receive churchgoers
as church members, no matter how worldly and unrepentant they may be? Let the
Scriptures reason you out of that for the good of your own soul and the poor
multitudes that you refuse to really preach to. “For what is man advantaged, if
he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away? For whosoever shall
be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when
he shall come in his own glory, and in his Father’s, and of the holy angels”
(Luke 9.25, 26.) If these verses seem not to touch you, then consider that you
may be spiritually blind. If you will not consider that you may be spiritually
blind, then count on it: you are spiritually blind for sure, for a man whose
eyes have been opened by the grace of God will not begrudge to examine his
profession of faith. Hath God given you a spirit of fear? (2 Timothy 1.7.)

2 comments:

I can think of only one sermon in the almost decade of living in Red Deer, where the pastor actually talked about the threat of hell as a real place, and that the unrepentant are going there. That one sermon was by Will Graham (Billy Graham's grandson) at the ENMAX Centrium years ago. What has happened to today's church is nothing less than a disaster. I think of it as the last church, the seventh church, the church at Laodicea, in Revelation 3.

Thank you for that confirming comment. I did not hear Will Graham that time. I have never heard him. I only remember one thing about his visit: the brochure advertising the event seemed to forecast sideshows instead of sermons. If the need of repentance and the certainty of hell were at least mentioned once, then I can be thankful just a bit. I hope there was a lasting influence on someone. The state of the Church today reminds me of that of the Laodiceans too. There is a remnant, however, in churches and out of churches. Every professing Christian must examine himself to make sure he is part of that remnant.

(One’s level of piety, whether devotional or practical, depends much on knowledge being either learned or misconceived. In these analyses we...

WHAT'S IN THE ARCHIVE

In the archive you will find extensive, thorough reviews of sermons delivered by pastors in Red Deer. These reviews, or analyses, are given to represent the content of what is being taught in the churches of this city and the manner in which this is done. Currently, there are over two dozen analyses on this site; they have subjected the pastors of 8 churches to the test of Scripture. Jump into the blog and into your Bible to see how true to Scripture your pastor's teachings and methods are. Scroll down to our book lists, make some prayerful choices from there, and go shopping at Amazon.ca or some place like that. The best books to read are not generally sold at your local Christian book store. Solomon's advice to get understanding is terrible advice to ignore.

TOP TEN BOOKS FOR HARD READERS

(2) HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY (J. H. MERLE D'AUBIGNE, 1846)

(3) PENSEES (BLAISE PASCAL, 1669; 1844)

(4) OLD TESTAMENT BIBLE HISTORY (ALFRED EDERSHEIM, 1876-1887; 1890)

(5) EXPOSITION OF THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS (ROBERT HALDANE, 1839)

(6) THE REFORMERS AND THE THEOLOGY OF THE REFORMATION (WILLIAM CUNNINGHAM, 1862)

(7) DISCUSSIONS, VOL 3 (R. L. DABNEY, 1892, 1897)

(8) STUDIES IN THEOLOGY (B. B. WARFIELD, 1932)

(9) MEMOIRS OF JONATHAN EDWARDS (SERENO E. DWIGHT, ed., c. 1834)

(10) THE CITY OF GOD (AUGUSTINE, 426)

MANY FALSE PROPHETS ARE GONE OUT INTO THE WORLD

1 JOHN 4.1

ABOUT WOLVES IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING

WE ARE NOT IMPLYING THAT ALL SERMONS REVIEWED HERE ARE THE WORKS OF WOLVES (FALSE TEACHERS) INSTEAD OF SHEEP (TRUE PROFESSORS.) BUT IF 'MANY FALSE PROPHETS' ARE GONE OUT INTO THE WORLD, THEY MUST RESIDE SOMEWHERE, AND IT SHOULD BE NO SURPRISE TO FIND A FEW OF THESE IN RED DEER. THEREFORE OUR WARNING IS JUST, AND THE APOSTLE WOULD APPROVE OUR QUOTING HIM. A WOLF MAY BE DISTINGUISHED FROM A SHEEP BY THE KIND OF GOSPEL HE PREACHES, WHETHER TRUE, OR FALSE. THIS IS THE CHIEF DISTINCTIVE.